


The Space Room

by Willowingends



Series: The Department of Mysteries [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-16 12:19:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5828329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Willowingends/pseuds/Willowingends
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had always been afraid of losing herself, of not knowing where, when, or why she was. Some said it was a side-affect of growing up with so many siblings, having to fight for an identity. But she knew it was more than that, Ginny always knew there was a greater fear coiled inside her heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Space Room

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Denationalization, disassociation, implied-selfharm

It's always the same dream, but not one she can explain to Harry. It would be too difficult to explain a feeling that is never truly experienced. Ginny knows he'd expect a dream about snakes and roosters, of blood on her hands and yellow glinting out of the corner of her eyes. He'd expect nightmares of the Chamber, of waking up beside his dead body, or with her consciousness trapped inside that of a young Tom Riddle's. 

And he's right, some nights, to assume that. Because she does have those dreams, and they do scare her, but they are not the ones that haunt her waking moments. They are not the ones that make her long for some certainty of reality. They are not the dreams that leave her trembling for hours until she passes out from exhaustion, from fear, from too many hours awake and desperate for a sign that she is real.

These are the nights where she wakes up in a cold sweat, her body trembling and heavier than a pile of rocks (because when one has no form, one does not weigh anything). 

These are the nights where she slips out of bed and cowers in the kitchen, because the bathroom is too cold and there are too many fragments of memory that resemble a bathroom (and while the dream does not take place in a bathroom, the memories of what they mean scare her). 

These are the nights she wraps herself in her warmest robes and sits in front of the oven that Harry insisted they buy, her hands held out closer to the enchanted flames that she made hover inside it (because electricity isn't warm enough, and flames dance before her eyes like a living creature). 

These are the nights she struggles to remember warmth, and reality, and the feeling of her own body being hers.

* * *

It starts in the dark, always the dark. With no sense of time or space, only a weightlessness that makes her question her senses, if she even has a body at all. She, They, It? All of them, all of her, floating in space with no defining characteristics. No way to know who she is, what she is. A disconnection between her soul and her body and her mind. 

And then it's the memories of this feeling. 

The memories of her first year where she could not recall her own body, her own mind, for extended periods of time.

The memories of her fourth year where she explored the Department of Mysteries and faced danger not in the form of Death Eaters, but in losing herself. 

How could they form a room where one lost one's self? The theory of gravity no longer applied and planets floated around you. The Space Room, where everything was beautiful and an enigma, if you could hold onto yourself long enough to study it.

It was the weightlessness that had startled her, when she walked into that room. The way her feet left the floor and she could no longer walk. The way her mind had no real control over her body, because you can't move in weightlessness. There's no force to push against, no way to move. And her fourteen year-old self panicked (and in the dreams, she is always panicked). With no control over the body, there was no certainty of the mind. With no certainty of the mind, how could she know she was the one in control?

And then her friends were around her, and they were talking normally, making their way through the room normally. And she was attuned to what they were saying, but she could not connect words to meanings. She could not connect their actions to her own. Where were they going? How close were they to their goal? How many of them had Potter brought with them and how strong were their magic and could they save her if she was lost? Would they wish to save her if she was lost?

Did she want them to save her? Or was she just another danger for them to face?

Harry had been afraid all year he was being possessed by Voldemort, but in that moment, what if it was her? What if she was the leak, the spy, the weak-link in this battle they fought? 

She screamed, she is always screaming in that darkness with the planets her silent observers. And no one responds, no one can hear her. Did she really scream? Or did she only think she had, while someone else ran her body, someone else spoke to the friends she was meant to protect?

She would be trapped their for eternity. No control, no body, nothing to call her own. There was nothing she could do to bring back the feeling of being a person, of being alive.

* * *

Ginny would awake with cold sweats and crowd close to a fire. She'd pinch herself, will herself, to feel, to have control. She'd long for anything that made her feel alive, and real. Her skin bright pink from her physical abuse, her eyes bloodshot from tears and her throat aching from silent screams. Her feet cold against the tile of the kitchen, her hands warm from the flames. A body, all her own, to control and destroy as she willed.

Connected and in control. That was what she really longed for on those nights when she'd singe her skin from sitting too close and awake on the kitchen floor, wrapped in her robes and Harry's arms as he gently held her and whispered he was there, and that he'd never leave her.

He would never leave her, but what if she left him? What if she drifted away one day and simply never came back?

She can not look at the stars anymore, knowing that they have seen her at her weakest. She can no longer trace the paths of the planets, because they have knocked her of course and left her trembling and afraid. She can ignore them, and she can will herself stronger, but they will always know the weakness she holds within her.


End file.
